© 2009 The White Horse Press. www.whpress.co.uk Unlicensed copying or printing, or posting online without permission is illegal. Colonial Forestry at its Limits: The Latter Day Career of Sir David Hutchins in New Zealand 1915–1920 MICHAEL ROCHE School of People Environment and Planning Massey University PB 11-222 Palmerston North New Zealand 4442 Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper explores imperial forestry networks by focusing on a single indi- vidual, Sir David Hutchins, who spent the final years of his life in New Zealand extolling the need for scientific forest management in the Dominion. Hutchins’ career had taken him from India to Southern Africa, to British East Africa and Australia, then finally to New Zealand. In New Zealand he advocated a colo- nial forestry model derived from his Indian and African experience. Whereas in Africa Hutchins was regarded as a champion of exotic afforestation, in New Zealand he was closely identified with indigenous forest management, further reinforcing Sivaramakrishnan’s ideas about how colonial location reshaped the appearance of scientific forestry. Hutchins focused much attention of the Kauri (Agathis australis) forests but encountered unexpected opposition and resist- ance from settler farmers, local politicians, and the local scientific community such as it was. KEYWORDS Colonial forestry, New Zealand, Sir David Hutchins Environment and History 16 (2010): 431–454 © 2010 The White Horse Press. doi: 10.3197/096734010X531489 © 2009 The White Horse Press. www.whpress.co.uk Unlicensed copying or printing, or posting online without permission is illegal. 432 MICHAEL ROCHE INTRODUCTION The late arrival of forestry science in New Zealand provides a trace, from the viewpoint of imperial networks, of the movements of people and practices of colonial forestry across space and through time in the British Empire.1 Forestry offers an interesting window into the British Empire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries precisely because it was not centred on the metropole, for there was no strong forestry tradition in England relative to France or Germany.2 For colonial forestry the ‘core’ was arguably in India but viewing forestry as moving in a relatively linear fashion from India to the rest of the Empire is, as Barton has suggested, too stark a depiction of a more complex series of transfers of people and ideas.3 Significant movements also took place along multiple pathways on the periphery of the Empire, with the result that forestry in the British Empire in the late nineteenth century was essentially a colonial enterprise that was reintroduced to Britain via India, while in the white settler Dominions colonial forestry science was slow to develop in the early twentieth century for forests were often seen as a barrier to settlement.4 One way of navigating around the unwieldy sets of ideas and practices constituting colonial forestry is to narrow the focus to a single individual, a limited period of time, and a particular place, in this instance Sir David Hutchins in New Zealand from 1915 to 1920. Forestry in the Empire developed in India where, initially, trained German foresters put in place a system of scientific forest management.5 The first Brit- ish foresters including Hutchins were trained at the famous Ecole Nationale des Eaux et Forêts at Nancy in France, before the forestry branch of the Royal Indian Engineering College was established at Coopers Hill in Oxfordshire, under Sir William Schlich in 1885. Schlich was a former Inspector General of Forests in the Indian Forest Service. Hutchins (1850–1920) was knighted for his services to forestry in 1920, the fourth forester in the British Empire to be so honoured, and the first of English descent. He was a major figure in colonial forestry, though a tier below such notables as Schlich, Brandis and Ribbentrop. His career, which spanned from the 1870s to 1920, began in India, but was largely spent in southern Africa and concluded in Australasia. This makes him an ideal individual through whom to explore colonial forestry and to gain some insights into the ways in which this imperial enterprise lost traction to both set- tler agriculture and locally oriented settler state forest policies in New Zealand. A closer study of forestry also intersects imperial with environmental histories.6 The environmental issues that colonial forestry sought to address were bundled around soil and water protection by retention of forests on upland areas and the provision of long-term timber supplies while generating revenues. Forestry doctrine regarded only the state as being capable of undertaking both of these roles in the long term. Some of the discussion from the 1870s to 1900s was couched in terms of ‘climatic conservation’ anchored around a belief that forests Environment and History 16.4 © 2009 The White Horse Press. www.whpress.co.uk Unlicensed copying or printing, or posting online without permission is illegal. 433 COLONIAL FORESTRY AT ITS LIMITS attracted rainfall, but this was reworked in the early twentieth century as water supply protection and erosion and flood control. The other major imperative was the role of colonial forestry in preventing a timber famine. By concentrat- ing on events in New Zealand during the early twentieth century it is possible to look at colonial forestry at the time and place where it had spread close to its maximum extent in the British Empire and its principles and practices were well established. In Hutchins’ case it furthermore marked the last chapter in a notable career in forestry. A New Zealand focus also allows scrutiny of an antagonistic relationship between ‘progress’ as variously articulated by colonial foresters and by white settler farmers. New Zealand provides a micro-study of various ways in which ‘progress’ was defined by an agriculturally and pastorally based settler society, and while it was ultimately extended to include some concessions for the preservation of remnant indigenous flora and fauna, invariably it clashed with a competing view of ‘progress’ in the form of forestry as a long term land use. Sustained yield management, the pinnacle of scientific forestry as it first emerged in French and German forestry, was intended to ensure a supply of timber in perpetuity and was based on four assumptions about scarcity, stabil- ity, certainty and the existence of a closed economy. The first of these held that timber products were in such short supply that forest land was most profitably used in intensive wood production, the second that a stable and regular flow of wood was required for the economy, the third that production techniques and consumption patterns are known so that planned forest production was possible 50 to 100 years ahead, and lastly, that forest production units and consumption units should coincide producing self sufficiency in timber.7 Foresters themselves came to realise that these four assumptions were quickly violated in colonial settings.8 Translated to India scientific forestry thus meant a considerable effort was expended on regulating timber extraction, increasing revenue from sale of for- est products, and implementing forest conservation. The last of these was to be secured by demarcating and reserving forests. As Guha and Gadgil noted, on the ground colonial forestry practice had a pronounced effect on the local populations. Its fourfold impact included a significant redefinition of property rights, demarcation of forests, changes to the composition of forest species, and sharp restrictions on customary use.9 To these Sivramakrishnan has added fire control.10 The view that colonial forestry was unequivocally progressive has been increasingly questioned from the 1990s.11 One example from Burma, but the point is a more general one by way of critique of colonial forestry, is that the focus on commercial use and state forest control portrayed ‘forestry as a “technical” subject that was beyond the realm of politics, and thereby immune to political conflict’ and marginalised questions of subsistence use and local control of forest lands.12 Colonial forestry took the form of a set of standard- ised regulatory practices informed by ideas sourced from continental European forestry science, founded on assumptions about scarcity, stability, certainty Environment and History 16.4 © 2009 The White Horse Press. www.whpress.co.uk Unlicensed copying or printing, or posting online without permission is illegal. 434 MICHAEL ROCHE and a closed economy with regard to timber. It played out in British India as an aggressive effort to demarcate the boundaries of reserved forest lands, to protect these areas against fire damage and to exclude local people from them in order to manage them for a mix of timber production and soil and water conservation. It was characterised by a particular confidence in the universality of its procedures whatever the forest type. One focus of the critique of colonial forestry as progressive has involved the study of local resistance, for instance to forest demarcation.13 This in turn raises questions about the wider character of resistance to colonial forestry in other parts of the Empire. SITUATING FORESTRY IN NEW ZEALAND The first attempt to introduce colonial forestry on Indian lines to New Zealand dated back to 1875 when Captain Inches Campbell Walker, the Conservator of Forests in Madras, was appointed to the position of Conservator of State Forests. Campbell Walker’s tenure was cut short by volatile factional poli- tics.14 Hesitant attempts to reintroduce state forestry were made in the 1880s, but financial retrenchment ended the experiment. Not until 1897, when forest inexhaustibility was rejected, did the settler state re-engage with forestry, and then, encouraged by earlier private experimentation, only in a very limited way via a modest exotic tree planting programme.15 These concerns culminated in a Royal Commission on Forestry in 1913 which set aside some forested areas as forest reserves, and recommended doubling the state exotic tree planting ef- fort to 7500 acres [3035 hectares] per annum in order meet a projected timber famine in thirty years (i.e.